Presentation at the RECODE Early Career Researcher Workshop at The University of Sheffield 14-15th May 2015

1. Policy RECommendations
for Open Access to Research
Data in Europe
Thordis Sveinsdottir
Trilateral Research & Consulting
RECODE Early Career Researcher Workshop
University of Sheffield 14-15th
May

2. The RECODE Project
• Policy recommendations on open
access to research data in Europe
• 24 months (Feb 2013 – Jan 2015)
• Funded by the European Commission
DG Research
• Grant agreement no: 321463

3. Grand challenges across 5 case studies

4. Outcomes of Interest
– Data must be ‘meaningful’ before it is made open, this may include a lot of work from
scientists with unclear benefit
– Currently no reward for ‘data work’ – peer reviewed publications
– Data comes in different forms,
– Lack of standardisation within many disciplines, idiosyncratic and individual ways of
managing and annotating data
– Ethical and legal issues of opening up patient and location data
– No ‘one size fits all’ – data is embedded within different research cultures, traditions and
practices
– Sustainable infrastructure is needed to host data, current short term funding models are
unable to ensure this
– Data Licencing standards need to be considered
– Early Career Researchers identified as a groups which require guidance on how to make
data open

5. Other key accomplishments
• 5 stakeholder workshops
• 168 workshop participants from 35 countries
• 65 Interviews with academics, researchers, policy-makers, data
centres, legal experts, publishers and others
• 1 Book in press – Mobilising Data in a Knowledge Society
• Over Arching Policy Recommendations
• Policy Recommendations for 4 Stakeholder groups - funders,
research institutions, data centres and publishers

6. Workshop Objectives
• Thinking about data – data often taken for granted (by-product of doing research)
• Thinking about how to make data open and useful for others (e.g. metadata)
• Promotion of good practice lessons in data management, preservation and sharing
for researchers
• Promote ethical practice in open access to research data

7. Further information
VISIT OUR WEBSITE
http://recodeproject.eu